Normally watching sports on TV is impossible with the kids. The Girl wants to watch The Hills or The OC or any show where beautiful teenagers complain about how misunderstood they are. “I’m so unhappy despite having plenty of money, low body fat and clear skin.” The Boy wants to watch anything she doesn’t. And both of them demand to be taken to Mom’s if I want to watch baseball, football, hockey, tennis or MMA.
It’s essential to find a distraction for them and, since they are significantly under 19, we can’t go to the sports bar. And the Ex would frown on the presence of pole dancers.
Boston Pizza becomes the sports-and-family-friendly venue of choice for the single dad. We went this weekend so I could watch the Celtics play the Pistons. The kids knew why we were there, but as long as they can have mozzarella sticks and milkshakes, they could be at a lecture about database security and not care. Weird thing is if I made mozza sticks and milkshakes at home, I’d still get grief if I had a game on TV.
When we sat down, the kids were given coloring placemats and crayons. Now they are waaaay too old to color at home, but at Boston Pizza, they dove right in, arguing over who used up the blue or red Crayola. Around the restaurant were other families with kids diligently coloring between the lines, and a few Free-Thinkers coloring wherever they pleased.
It made me think about what point I stopped coloring; I remember loving it as a kid. I will still do other kids things if the opportunity presents itself: airplane models, jigsaw puzzles, running through the sprinklers in my underpants. But I would never consider sitting down with a black and white outline of a scene and a box of crayons.
You can go online to www.coloring.com, select a new picture every day use the palette tool to fill in the shapes and post it. However, just like anything on-line (such as cooking or porn), you miss the smell and feel of the materials.
I must start coloring again, and let you know if it comes back like riding a bicycle. Or eating paste.
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3 comments:
Take it a step further - buy yourself some play-dough
I'd never get any work done; squeezing it through the little guys head in the play-dough barbershop is too adicting.
Ex mother-in-law used to make homemade play-dough. How cheap do you have to be to save a buck on play-dough?
My kids use coloring.com and thecolor.com. Thecolor.com has more stuff for kids to color online. Thecolor.com is very similar to coloring.com.
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